In the Fall of 1937, Popular Publications launched a new type of detective magazine, one that combined the weird-menace-style stories that had made Terror Tales and Horror Stories so hot with readers with hardboiled detective-action tales. They called it Strange Detective Mysteries. In his first-issue editorial, managing editor Rogers Terrill set the stage: "Remember the time you read that one perfect knockout detective story - bizarre, mysterious, thrill-packed, different? It still remains the detective story for you."

Terror Tales: Harrison Storm and Russell Gray

Before he became an acclaimed mystery novelist, Bruno Fischer moonlighted as one of the most crafty practitioners of the arcane art of the Weird Menace tale, filling the pages of Terror Tales and other Popular Publications pulp magazines like a madman. It was the middle of the Great Depression.

The Complete Cases of Max Latin

Enjoy the adventures of Max Latin, the detective who doesn't want to be a detective! Author Norbert Davis mixed the classic hard-boiled style with humor, making Max Latin unique in pulp fiction. Appearing for five screwball stories in Dime Detective, this new edition includes an authoritative introduction by fellow Dime Detective scribe John D. MacDonald.

Horror Stories, Volume 1

Once again, we've combed through innumerable issues to cull the best - or should we say worst? - offerings torn from the torturous pages of Horror Stories. These terrific tales have been handed to Milton Bagby, who delivers them with gruesome gusto. Listen with the lights on. You might end up sleeping the same way.

Dime Mystery Magazine, Volume 1

We thought: If customers like this brand of retro-horror so much, why not go back to the dark well from which it all sprang? That meant Dime Mystery Magazine, the pulp that started the Weird Menace sub-genre back around Halloween of the horrific year of 1933. Since we were planning on celebrating the 80th anniversary of Popular Publication's G-8 And His Battles Aces and The Spider during this autumnal epoch, why not do the same for their sister publication?

Vampires Overhead

As a follow-up to that novel and a special Halloween treat, this month we present another title from the Wagner list, this time from the Science Fiction category. One of the famous Creeps series published in England, it is a unique horror story that describes a vampire invasion from outer space. The monsters are definitely Vampires Overhead! The author of this forgotten classic of horror fiction was Alan Hyder. As best as can be determined, Vampires Overhead was Hyder's only work of horror fiction.

Terror Tales, Book 1

In 1934, a new type of magazine was born. Known by various names - the shudder pulps, mystery-terror magazines, horror-terror magazines - weird menace is the sub-genre term that has survived today. Terror Tales was one of the most popular. It came from Popular Publications, whose publisher Harry Steeger was inspired by the Grand Guignol theater of Paris. This breed of pulp story survived less than ten years, but in that time, they became infamous, even to this day.

Doctor Death #1, February 1935

The maddest of the mad scientists - Doctor Death - starred in his own bizarre pulp magazine in early 1935. He consorted with demons, elementals, zombies, disinterred mummies, and other unclean denizens of Hell. Standing against him were the Secret 12, a band of the top U.S. civil and business leaders, headed by Jimmy Holm, a millionaire criminologist and occultist. One of the rare unabashedly supernatural series the pulps ever produced, Doctor Death returns in vintage pulp tales, reissued as audiobooks.

Spider #1 October 1933 (The Spider)

The Spider, but who was otherwise a faceless phantom. The big mystery of the origins of The Spider magazine is that they were not one, but two, writers named R. T. M. Scott. The first was the father to the second. Reginald Thomas Maitland Scott was one of the most famous writers of the 1920s. His son, Robert Thomas Maitland Scott, was new to the writing world.

The Case of the Clown Who Laughed & The Case of the Invisible Enemy: The Green Lama #4

Inspired by a Columbia University, who had journeyed to far-off Tibet to plumb the occult mysteries of Lamaism, Crossen concocted millionaire Jethro Dumont, who did the same. “I was trying to pick a name somewhat like in sound to Lamont Cranston,” Crossen candidly admitted. “You know what I mean, Lamont-Dumont. It was as close as I dared get to Lamont Cranston. A book had just been published about an American who had gone to Tibet and studied and had become a lama, the only white person who ever had at that time. The result was the Green Lama, which the company liked.”

Doc Savage: Python Isle

When a long-lost aviator returns from a doomed flight, it leads to the kidnapping of Doc Savage aide Renny Renwick, and plunges the Man of Bronze into a daring quest for the secret of Python Isle, where a strange civilization thrives in the fastness of the remote Indian Ocean.

Terror Tales, Volume 2

In 1934, a new type of magazine was born. Known by various names - the shudder pulps, mystery-terror magazines, horror-terror magazines - weird menace is the sub-genre term that has survived today. Terror Tales magazine was one of the most popular. This audiobook contains a collection of stories from the pages of Terror Tales magazine, all written by Wyatt Blassingame, reissued for today’s listeners.

The Complete Cases of Cass Blue, Volume 1

New York-based private investigator Cass Blue is a morally flexible tough guy who backs up his hard-boiled rhetoric with frequent applications of the blackjack he carries in a hip pocket. No case is too seedy or sordid for him to take, and he's capable of taking as much as he dishes out when it's necessary. The cops don't trust him much more than they do the criminals, but that doesn't keep him from giving clients full value for their retainers.

Terror Tales, Volume 1

Among fans of classic pulp fiction, aficionados of supernatural stories consider Popular Publications' Terror Tales, the magazine, for people who found the Lovecraftian stories in Weird Tales too tame and Universal's classic monsters too Hollywood! Between 1934 and 1941, Terror Tales and its legion of unholy authors spewed forth an unremitting litany of horror, terror, torment, and torture - all directed at ordinary American couples faced with supernatural menaces torn from their deepest, darkest nightmares. Think Scream during the Great Depression.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Never before in audio, these vintage stories are the darkest of the dark, and the best of the best.

Crime fiction fans old and new will delight in rediscovering these taut, character-rich, heart-stopping tales, now on audio for the first time.

Doc Savage: The Frightened Fish

A far-ranging adventure that begins in New York City with sightings of mysterious people inexplicably terrified by images of ordinary fish, and brings the Man of Bronze to New England, where all sea life has mysteriously disappeared from Massachusetts coastal waters. The trail ultimately takes Doc by submarine to Occupied Japan, and an incredible showdown with a foe from his past, who was believed to have perished in the 1945 novel, The Screaming Man.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by "the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine" (Booklist).

Inner Sanctum Mysteries: Oldtime Radio Shows

This is an collection of Inner Sanctum Mysteries, an oldtime radio show from the 1940s and 1950s. If you love a good horror story, you'll love these. You get all these (and many others plus more of the same genre):

Doc Savage: The Forgotten Realm

Declared insane, the X Man patiently tended his weird plants until the day, impelled by a nameless terror, he fled Wyndmoor Asylum to unleash a cyclone of violence that was destined to suck the mighty Man of Bronze into the blackest, most unbelievable mystery of his entire career. For far from Scotland lay a domain of death unknown to the world and called by the ancient Latin name of Novum Eboracum -- New York! From the wild Scottish moors to the unexplored heart of darkest Africa, Doc Savage and his indomitable men embarked upon a desperate quest for the Forgotten Realm.

The Secret 6: #1 October 1934

Criminals quaked at the name The Secret 6. And for four glorious issues, this team of six crimefighters took on some of the weirdest and most fantastic antogonists that ever reared their heads in the pulp magazines. It was where weird menace met six normal men with no strange gadgets or outlandish skills. But after four issues, the over-the-top action came to an end and Popular Publications pulled the plug on the series. These vintage pulp tales are now reissued for today's listeners as audiobooks.

Pulp

Opening with the exotic Lady Death entering the gumshoe-writer's seedy office in pursuit of a writer named Celine, this novel demonstrates Bukowski's own brand of humour and realism, opening up a landscape of seamy Los Angeles.

Doc Savage: The Jade Ogre

Who-or what- is Quon? All of Asia knows him as a devil in human form, a twisted, armless monster with a face of imperial jade. Long dead, Quon has returned from the grave to spread his fatal Jade Fever and subjugate mankind. From San Francisco's Chinatown, across the vast Pacific to the spidery jungle ruins of Cambodia, Doc Savage and his resourceful crew battle a seemingly-unbeatable foe whose deadly reach knows no barriers, and whose evil ambitions know no bounds.

Nick Carter: Master Detective, Volume 1

This collection stars Lon Clark as Nick Carter, Master Detective - that "most famous of all man-hunters" - in 18 riveting whodunits selected from this long-running radio series! Joining the private eye in these tales of detection is Helen Choate and Charlotte Manson as Nick's Girl Friday Patsy Bowen, John Kane as Scrubby Wilson, and Ed Latimer as Sgt. "Matty" Mattison. These fantastic episodes, originally released in our long out-of-print cassette collection, are now available in digital from the Radio Spirits Archives Collection.

The Third Cry to Legba and Other Invocations: Selected Stories of Manly Wade Wellman, Volume 1

This audiobook collects Wellman’s John Thunstone and Lee Corbet stories, written between 1943 and 1979. These stories combine the mystical and horrific with traditional Southern folk tales and legends. These stories also reveal a post-World War II modernism that make them much more then pulp romanticism. The paranoia and cynicism of modern weird icons, such as The X-files, may well have had their genesis in the pulp musings of Manly Wade Wellman.

Publisher's Summary

In the Fall of 1937, Popular Publications launched a new type of detective magazine, one that combined the weird-menace-style stories that had made Terror Tales and Horror Stories so hot with readers with hardboiled detective-action tales.

They called it Strange Detective Mysteries.

In his first-issue editorial, managing editor Rogers Terrill set the stage: "Remember the time you read that one perfect knockout detective story - bizarre, mysterious, thrill-packed, different? It still remains the detective story for you. You've wondered why you never found another. You searched bookstores, library shelves, newsstands - but you just couldn't find that brand!

"Beginning with this issue - we give you Strange Detective Mysteries - not only one bizarre, thrilling, eerie-laden mystery story such as you've searched for, but a whole magazine full of them!

"Because you have sought for this highest type of detective story, without finding it, you can understand at what cost we bring you this magazine. Months of planning and effort have gone into its making. The best-known and most-able detective-story writers have been called upon - for their best. Only the smallest proportion of a flood of manuscripts has been chosen.

"Crime-detection, adventure, baffling mystery - all this you will find in Strange Detective Mysteries. In addition, you will find that quality which appears in a detective story only once in a blue moon - the bizarre!"

Terril served the word bizarre no less than five times in his editorial, italicizing it twice. He was serious! Strange Detective Mysteries was beyond weird.

For his lead story, Terrill served up "When the Death-Bat Flies", by the writer he called "America's No. 1 Master of the Extraordinary Mystery Tale", The Spider's Norvell W. Page. Starring master magician Aubrei Dunne, it was a wild excursion into a criminal cult dedicated to murder and mayhem.

In "Madame Murder - and the Corpse Brigade", Paul Ernst offered an even more bizarre hero - Seekay, the man with no face!

The detective protagonist of Wayne Rogers' "The Headman's Hat-Box" witnesses a murder committed by - himself!

In George Armin Shaftel's "The Miracle Murder Case", a prison break is engineered by an unknown mastermind who terrorizes society with a weird super-weapon!

Terror Tales favorite Arthur Leo Zagat's "Patents for Dr. Death" revisits the realm of Jack the Ripper - but with a weird twist.

Finally, Norbert Davis' "Idiot's Coffin Keepsake" takes us to a weird mansion and the grisly mystery of the missing hand.

Narrated by Michael C. Gwynne, Roy Worley and Roger Price, this RadioArchives.com audiobook brings to vibrant life one of the most exciting first issues of any pulp mystery magazine ever published! Don't miss it!

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